In the interest of sparing you the same aggravation, here’s what you need to do that Apple fails to clarify:

• Open one PDF in Preview, then drag the other PDF from the Finder into that window. Apple’s online help is correct through this step.

• Do not try to save the combined PDF. Do not use the File menu’s “Export as PDF…” command. Both will leave you with a document consisting only of the first PDF.

• Instead, go to the File menu, select “Print…” and then click the downward-facing button next to “PDF” at the lower-left corner. Select “Save as PDF…” and you will have your combined PDF file.

Dear Apple: When I gripe about the state of software quality on the Mac these days, it’s things like this that usually set me off. Here we have a completely unintuitive process in which the correct way to do things sits three clicks deep in the app’s UI–and two clicks further in than the menu options that look like they’d do the job. And I know I’m not the only user irked by it.

The news station interviewed me about Facebook’s unprecedented but welcome move to less-public default settings. As I said on the air: With this change, it’s definitely not throwback Thursday at Facebook HQ.

This story had an exceptionally prolonged gestation: I waited way too long to file the thing, and then my editor wanted to hold off running it until the site could launch its redesign. That redesign, in turn, took months longer than expected (I don’t know the details, nor do I want to know the details). There are a couple of references in the piece that show its age–for example, iTunes Radio is no longer an “upcoming” product–and should be fixed soon.

I was unpleasantly surprised by the poor quality of the apps I tried for downloading multiple photos from Flickr and Facebook. (Hint: Adobe Flash is not a good middleware layer to build an app on these days.) The tip part of the column suggests that readers take another look at OS X’s Preview utility and the Paint app in Windows for basic image editing.